Writing tips for chee 450 or... how to increase your grade by 10% without much effort

1. Writing tips for chee 450 or... how to increase your grade by 10% without much effort or... how to increase your salary by 10% of more over your lifetime without much effort

2. Reader turn offs • grammatical problems, spelling errors • lack of clarity • not concise • sloppy editing

3. Misrepresentation of information presented • empty overstatement or understatement • “A great deal of research has been conducted on....” • “Cell viability rests at a mere 6.4%.” • “Current wound dressing technologies include a vast array of dressings...” • don't use adjective or adverb unless you absolutely must

4. Sentence constructs to ctr/alt/del from your brain cells • In order to measure the cell density, a spectrophotometer was used.... replace with.... “Cell density was measured spectrophotometrically.” • The medium was created to ensure carbon limitation.... Scientists and engineering formulate, synthesize, fabricate, design.... leave the creating to God • Joe told me that this lecture was going to be boring; therefore, I told him that it would be reflected in his mark. • The word “with” is not a good word to end a sentence with. • To start a sentence with the word “to”, can result in awkward phrasing that follows. Why then do so many students want to start new paragraphs with prepositions? (in, but, to, when, if, of, for...) • "The study focused on..." or "Many studies have chosen to focus on ...” (anthropomorphism)

5. Sentence constructs to ctrl/alt/del • "After placing the tubes in a rack, they were incubated....” (using a pronoun when a noun would be more clear... and why would you refer to tubes as “they”? .... and by “they”, do you mean the tubes or the rack? • “... through contact with researchers at RMC (Rick Mercer Commission? Random Meaningless Contacts; Raw Meat n' Coleslaw? Real Men Can? Rusty Metal Containers? Relish, Mustard and Cetchup?) • “Cytokines act as intracellular mediator or signaling molecules(www.wikipedia.org/wiki).. • citing encyclopedia, wiki, yahoo.com, textbook.... doesn't cut it

6. Consider “soft” expressions... to avoid getting the reviewer's back up • hard position soft position • - it is proven that - it appears that... • it is obvious that - one explanation may be that... • it is a fact that - it could be interpreted that... • - it must be concluded that - a conclusion that may be drawn... • the only interpretation is - it may be assumed that.. • - establishes the fact that - it could be concluded that..

7. Singular.... plural and vice versa The data was .... or The data were....? The cells was.... or The cells were.....? The tube was.... or The tube were....?

8. Use of personal pronouns in technical writing... • We did this... Our data shows... We concluded that... • practice increasing in frequency • easy to avoid completely, and often minimizes ambiguity • try not to refer to things, with personal pronouns (they, them...

9. Tables n’ Figures • personally, I would remove background stuff like shading, horizontal lines, box around plot... • Excel can be rather amateurish, but a professional will take control • examples: Excel introduces a legend above the figure, often within the box. I would eliminate that and provide a full descriptive label, typically under the figure. • all figures/tables must be numbered, and don’t use figure legends that read "This vs that”. • refer to all figures/tables by # in text. Don’t say “as seen in table 1 below, as the table/figure almost always appear “below”, and may appear elsewhere in final manuscript.